It was all hands on deck Thursday morning to clear snow off the runways at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

With the wind blowing from the northwest Thursday, the airport alternated runways at about half capacity, using one for 24 takeoffs and 24 landings per hour while crews cleared the other, and then switching.

And they work fast, using a 22-vehicle "conga line" of snow plows, blowers, sand trucks, de-icer sprayers and a friction-measuring rig to clear the 10,000-foot-long — that's 2 million square feet — south parallel runway faster than some people can start their snow blowers.

"If we have to, we can clear that surface in less than 10 minutes. It's just a matter of how many vehicles we put out there," said Paul Sichko, assistant director of MSP operations.

Flights were delayed by about 45 minutes Thursday morning, but were back to normal by noon as the heaviest snow moved into Wisconsin, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The 53-foot-long plow-broom vehicles are the heavy artillery of the operation. The plow clears a 20-foot-wide path that's cleaned up by a broom trailer. The eight-wheel contraption has just one driver, but a computer puts the trailer in the right place.

"Wherever you put the blade, the broom will follow automatically," Sichko said.

The unit also has a blower to clear snow from the 4,000-plus lights that line the runways and taxiways and the more than 400 signs that tell pilots which way to go.

Trailing the plow brooms is a heavy-duty blower that can shoot snow 500 feet. Trucks follow to put down sand and potassium acetate, a liquid deicing alternative to salt, which is prohibited within the airport's fence because salt is corrosive to aircraft aluminum.

A rolling friction-tester helps crews measure the effectiveness of their snow removal and deicing efforts.

The snow removal team has more than 100 pieces of equipment and 125 people. When it snows, everybody comes in.

"We house them, feed them and keep them here. We like to joke that many of the crew have never shoveled their own driveways because they're here," Sichko said.